Sunny Consolvo
Sunny Consolvo is a people person. She melds engineering with design and usability to study how individuals in the real world interact with and are affected by new technology. Prior to studying human-computer interaction at UC Berkeley, Consolvo was an interior designer and event planner. She came to Intel Research Seattle in 2001 after a stint in industry working on web design and usability. Along with conducting research on human activity inferencing, Consolvo spearheads the Place Lab user studies.

Q1: How do you conduct a user study?
A1: One method suited for Place Lab is called the Experience Sampling Method. It's a field study technique borrowed from psychology used to understand things such as mood and social interactions. In the case of the Place Lab ESM, users will carry around PDAs that will occasionally interrupt them throughout the day with questions about what they're doing or what kind of information they'd like to have that location-enhanced applications could provide.

Q2: What is the benefit of the ESM technique?
A2: It enables you to follow people throughout their normal day. It exposes many more situations that are of interest than if you interviewed the participants later and counted on their recall.

Q3: How would an ESM study work for Place Lab?
A3: Users would come in and set up a rule-based system for some location-enhanced application. For example, you might say that it's OK for your friend to be alerted when you pass through her neighborhood. Later, when you do arrive in her neighborhood, the EMS questionnaire, perhaps on a PDA, might ask you if you're willing to let her know where you are. You might say no. And so we'd like to know why you said no when previously you said it would be OK. That way we can understand when and how rule-based systems break down.

Q4: What do you hope to gain from the early Place Lab user studies?
A4: We're trying to understand what kinds of information people are interested in. It's formative work to inform the design of applications. Also, location-enhanced computing raises big social issues. And we don't know the social norms for a location-aware society. For instance, personal safety is at the top of my list. Traditionally, if a man meets a woman at a party and asks for her phone number, she can politely decline, give an excuse, or provide her work number instead of her cell. She can even make up a number to subtly send a message to him without embarrassing him publicly. What happens though when he asks to put her on his location-enhanced buddy list? We don't know what the social norms are in those situations. We need the same kinds of mechanisms that allow us to deal with situations when people ask for our phone number.

Q5: What is the primary Place Lab challenge you're trying to solve?
A5: For me, the challenge is educating users. If someone doesn't understand what risk they're putting themselves in, they're not going to make very good decisions about how to customize or use their device.

Q6: What do you most enjoy about user studies?
A6: It's that they help us design and develop technology that can truly enhance people's lives. It may sound pretty obvious, but conducting user studies keeps us focused on designing solutions for real people.